Photo Credit: Taylor Swift by Paolo Villanueva / CC by 2.0
A group of nearly 400 Taylor Swift fans and other concertgoers filed a lawsuit in California state court against Ticketmaster over price gouging.
Taylor Swift fans are suing Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation with allegations of colluding with partner organizations to intentionally drive up ticket prices. The complaint, filed in California state court by almost 400 concertgoers, expands on an existing federal court case accusing Ticketmaster and Live Nation of engaging in a pattern of racketeering activity.
Plaintiffs allege that Ticketmaster and Live Nation have behaved in violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, legislation famously used in the 1980s by the DOJ to bring down high-ranking members of the New York mafia. Swift fans assert that Ticketmaster and its parent company colluded with stadium venues and other partners in a way that constitutes an illegal enterprise.
“These businesses are working together as members of a monopoly — we call them a cartel,” said Jennifer Kinder, founding attorney at Kinder Law, which is representing the plaintiffs in both the federal case and the newly filed state case. “They monopolize the market so that an individual consumer does not have a fair chance at a fairly priced ticket.”
Swift fans first brought their federal case against Ticketmaster in December 2022 in the wake of botched ticket sales for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. Issues with the ticketing website left fans waiting for hours to secure tickets that should have been available to them under an early access program; many were ultimately left empty-handed. But even as fans waited, tickets began to emerge on Ticketmaster’s own resale marketplace at inflated prices, though Live Nation disputes this.
That debacle led to a hearing in the US Senate on consolidation in the ticketing industry, with the US Department of Justice filing an antitrust lawsuit in May with the hopes of breaking up Ticketmaster and Live Nation.
Meanwhile, Live Nation calls the DOJ’s lawsuit “a PR win” in the short term, but asserts it will “lose in court because it ignores the basic economics of live entertainment, such as the fact that the bulk of service fees go to venues, and that competition has steadily eroded Ticketmaster’s market share and profit margin.”
As for the latest lawsuit, Live Nation called the claims “baseless.” “This lawsuit is based on false assumptions about how ticketing works. Artist teams, not Ticketmaster, set ticket prices.” Further, Live Nation says it “does not own stadiums in the US and primary tickets are consistently priced below market value, as evidenced by resale prices averaging more than double.”
The two lawsuits are nearly identical, but the newer one expands the scope to include fans of artists other than Taylor Swift, as well as adding an alleged RICO violation. That allegation hinges entirely on the premise of Ticketmaster and Live Nation working with partner organizations to exert market dominance in a way that meets the definition of an enterprise per the RICO Act.
“Live Nation and Ticketmaster exploit the relationship between themselves and with stadium venues largely owned by Live Nation to achieve the purpose of their enterprise, and have been doing so ever since the Department of Justice ill-advisedly approved their merger nearly a decade and a half ago,” reads the filing.
According to Kinder, bringing the RICO claim helps fans to “[attack] from different fronts,” opening additional avenues through which they might win a ruling in their favor. Whether any of those allegations will make it to trial remains to be seen — the federal lawsuit is currently on hold, pending the outcome of an appeal in a separate antitrust case.